Spontaneous Scholar: daquell

Following close on the heels of the mysterious truck crash, another unsettling event has befallen our quiet neighborhood:

It’s late at night, and I hear a thumping coming from the corner of our house. I assume my sisters are taking the dog out. This close to midnight? The thumps continue… and then I hear my sisters talking downstairs. If it isn’t them, who is it? I decide to find out.

My dad and sisters are downstairs, looking out the windows. I grab a club and go outside, spooking them. They take off across the road into our neighbor’s yard (the same neighbors with the ditch). They refers to two teenage boys who apparently have never read any good books on burglarly or stealth… they are walking openly across our neighbor’s lawn wearing white shirts and tan shorts. They cross one lawn… two… three. I stand and watch them.

Suddenly, a voice calls out. “What are you kids doing!?” A neighbor has seen the hooligans. They take off down the road and turn a corner. The neighbor and I meet briefly in the road before he jumps into his car and gives chase. I stay behind to see if they loop back. In the meanwhile, I go into the house and get a Maglight and my sword.

Minutes pass, and the neighbor finally comes back. “They tore some fence posts down and laid them across the road,” he says. “I threw them into the ditch.” We bid each other goodnight. “Crazy kids…” I hear him mutter.

One more thing. Our other neighbor has teenage kids. Not ten minutes after this happened, a car pulled into their driveway. A man got out (whether teenager or not, I am not sure), crossed the lawn, and went inside. Coincidence? Maybe…

At any rate, I was up until 3:00 AM making sure they didn’t come back. With all the excitement going on around here, who needs sleep?

It is approximately 2:25… AM. My parents and I have just been awakened by loud, squealing tires and a sickening jolt of crunching metal and shattering glass.

Looking out the window, we see a single headlight shining up from our neighbor’s ditch. I believe it is a car; my parents say it used to be a motorcycle. Apparently, the driver must have incredible agility, because he was able to get out of that death-trap unscathed (but apparently not agile enough to turn a simple corner… but who can turn 90° going 90+ miles an hour?). He is currently hopping up and down. And–yes, another person (probably a friend who is throwing some drunken party that the vehicle-crasher was steaming to) is coming down the road. The headlight goes off, whether automatic or manual I do not know. The two people walk off together around a bend in the street and pass from sight.

My parents go back to bed. I’ve decided to stay up and watch if anything happens.

After a few minutes, a person comes running stealthily down the road from the direction that the two others walked. He looks around the truck, crawls to the cab, and appears to take something out of it. Beer, perhaps? Or something worse? He runs off back down the street.

EDIT—
3:02 AM - Nothing further has come to pass. I decide to lightly rest.

3:54 AM - Bright lights explode through my bedroom. They pulse in a blue hue, jolting me awake. I realize that I’m not alone… a tall figure is standing over me. “Get up!” It says. I, being still sleepy and not fully awake, tense.

“Who are you!?” I ask this in my coolest, dead-pan snarl. The figure takes an involuntary step backwards.

“I’m your sister!” I feel rather foolish, but with crazy drunken drivers riding around (and egging people’s houses… but that is for perhaps another post), one can never be too careful.

We look out my window to see a police car with the brightest blue, flashing lights parked by the wreck. A large lorry is hooked up to the crashed vehicle, trying to pull it out of the ditch. In the dark, all I can see is a metal frame. I had been right. This was no motorcycle. With a slow, grinding pull, the chains retract. The metal heap raises up, flipping solidly over. It was a pickup-truck, flipped entirely in the ditch. A friendly tree had caught it, preventing a roof cave-in. However, the front of the truck looks like a scrawled V, crunched from a pipe sticking out in the ditch. The windshield is shattered. After some maneuvering, the truck rests on the lorry. A policeman and the lorry-driver talk some; they are joined by a third random man who appears out of the dark. The police- and random-man get into the trooper car and follow the lorry off down the street.

EPILOGUE—
The next morning broke without too much flurry. That is, until I called our neighbors who own the ditch. They had slept solidly through the entire affair. The entire family (and visiting relatives) come trooping out to inspect the damage. I join them on their property and related my observations. The ditch is ground up, with deep tire tracks looping up out of them. Apparently, the driver lost control, skidded all across the road, flew into the ditch, and hit the concrete pipe going at least 45 miles an hour (personal estimation). Any ornaments on that side of the ditch are now destroyed, and dirt is thrown up around deep rivulets. The friendly tree has lost a limb, it seems. An electric box was missed by a mere six inches.

Who crashed? Why were they out speeding at 2:25? What will their parents do about it? Perhaps we will never know.

Apparently, that wasn’t the last of such nonsense.

This evening, my sister was home alone while we all went to church. She says that she was upstairs when she heard someone banging on the back door leading in from our porch. When she heard the noises, she called Mom…

…and that’s all that happened. Nobody has broken in–yet.

Our house was egged this morning (or sometime last night). I think we shall survive, though.

The egg-throwers were merciful… they only three one egg. We washed it off without much ado, got in our van, and attended Sunday morning church.

Hopefully that will be the last of such nonsense.

A respectable part of the life of the average programmer is the maintenance of a good work environment.

if you think the above sentence is boring, do not lose hope. there are pictures at the end of this post!

One of the huge quandaries of the aspiring college student is what to do with all the stuff he (or she) needs while at college but has no use for while at home. Ex. A hot-pot, while indispensable at school in lieu of a microwave or oven, is utterly useless at home. Who wants hot-potted Ramen when Fettuccine Alfredo is just fourteen stair-steps away? (Fortunately for me, my hot-pot was “borrowed” and never returned… problem solved) Read the rest of this entry »

This semester, the fires of sonnetry have been kindled within me again. I was afraid, after a rather dry season last year, that my unoriginal logic side had conquered me, and I would never be able to write poetry again.

So, although I have never published any sonnets that I know of, I shall post my fifth, In Restless Grove. It is rather an experiment, being the first sonnet that I have attempted writing entirely in the delviiden alphabet. This means, among other things, that I couldn’t gloss over the previous lines, which resulted in it being slightly disconnected.

Without further ado…